On 2016-10-19 06:42 AM, Sona Sarmadi wrote:

From https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Stable_branch_maintenance:

General policies:

Fixes must go into master first unless they are applicable only to the
stable branch; if back-porting to an older stable branch, the fix
should first be applied to the newer stable branches before being
back-ported to the older branch

Does anyone know the reason for the policy above i.e. why fixes have
to go to master first?

1)      It makes more sense at least for users  to get CVE fixes as soon as
possible in the maintenance branches.

this is to ensure, that we do not regress next time when we release next
version from master. So its important to ensure that the fix has been
applied to master sometimes you can assert that the fix has gone into new
version of a package that is due to be uprevved in master and will be
done soonish. Such information is helpful when making security patches
for release branches.

Actually there was a suggestion at OEDEM on informing CVE ml that we
have as the CVE fixes get applied to metadata. Thats a good suggestion to
have implemented.


Thanks everyone for your explanation.

Yes regressions (forgetting to fix bugs in master) are bad.  I believe there
are other ways to avoid this, Yocto project has a bug reporting system to
have track of such things, right?

Unfortunately, code talks. Unless you strictly follow a procedure like
'master first', you end up with an ever growing list of bugs and
backports. Doing some sort of bulk backport increases the chance of
instability .. not to mention when someone is actively working on an
issue, they have all the context to asses the issue, understand the
change and then fix it in the appropriate branches. If you delay the
backporting by months, you lose that context and the job becomes much
harder.


Maintenance branches are likely deployed in production systems, I think
Fixing security problems here should have higher priority. Don't you agree?

I wouldn't agree that maintenance branches are any more important for
this than the current tip.

Bruce


Perhaps we should discuss this at next OEDEM :)

Cheers //Sona


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